Plans for Certifying Google Chrome with E-Business Suite

Google Chrome is a popular browser in the consumer sector. It's fast, clean, and standards-compliant. It's also popular internally at Oracle: many of our own Applications Technology Group staff -- notably, our OA Framework architects and developers -- ignore Oracle's own desktop standards and use Chrome as their default browser.

This tells you that Chrome generally works nicely with Oracle E-Business Suite. There may be some quirks with specific products, but it is largely compatible with most OA Framework-based screens.

That said, it isn't officially certified with the E-Business Suite.

Why not?

We're reserving judgement on making it an official certification because of what appears to be low demand from EBS enterprise customers. This seemingly-low demand doesn't warrant expanding our current certification permutations further.

Adding Chrome for just Windows 7 and 8 could add up to 48 new combinations to be tested.

The impending death of the conventional browser certification model

You're probably not shocked to hear that we don't test every one of those 400 combinations with every new EBS release. And, yes, I've heard every variant of the obvious jokes about the number of combinations that we actually do test.

It's clear that conventional certification approaches aren't sustainable. Mobile devices and their associated browsers are proliferating. The new reality of bring-your-own-device (BYOD) in the enterprise space is inescapable.

In 2011, Mozilla switched Firefox to a rapid release cycle with a new release coming out every six weeks. Most enterprises (including Oracle) can't keep up with that deployment rate, so we switched our E-Business Suite + Firefox certification track to Mozilla's Extended Support Release (ESR) channel. Mozilla's ESR releases come out every 12 months.

My impression is that enterprises have become a little wary of using Firefox since Mozilla's change to a rapid release cycle. I conduct straw polls of my audiences at various conferences. It seems like enterprise use of Firefox has dwindled dramatically in the last few years.

That's just a theory, and it doesn't affect our certification policies. We've certified Firefox with the E-Business Suite in the past, so we'll continue to certify Firefox for the foreseeable future. But that illustrates the importance of being careful about certification decisions. Once we certify something, it's very difficult to withdraw support in the future.

This begs some interesting questions. If enterprise usage of Firefox changed because of Mozilla's switch to a rapid release cycle, what do enterprises think of Chrome's rapid release cycle? Google doesn't offer an equivalent of Mozilla's annually-updated option for Chrome. How are enterprises managing Chrome deployments?

Luckily for those customers, the vast majority of EBS OA Framework-based (HTML) screens work reliably with a wide range of certified and uncertified browsers, including Chrome. Things get trickier when dealing with the Forms-based products that require specific JRE releases, but this generally isn't an issue since Forms-based EBS products aren't available to "external" (non-enterprise) users.

Would you like us to certify Chrome with EBS?

Chrome generally works well with the E-Business Suite, but we can only provide EBS patches for issues that can be reproduced with certified browsers.

If you'd like us to add Chrome as an officially-certified browser, please log a Service Request and ask Support to update enhancement request 5921574 with details about:

Your business case (e.g. "student user population not centrally managed")

Our company's desktop standard for a web browser is IE but like you've said, we have a lot of people that ignore that standard and prefer to use Google Chrome. Since our standard is IE we (the IT support team) never tried to use our EBS system with Chrome. Most of our internal users interact with OA Framework pages and I have seen our users access OA Framework apps using Chrome without any problems. Yesterday one of our users reported that they could not launch the Forms applications through Chrome. I tried it myself and wasn't able to do so. The error I get is as follows:

I did a quick search on Oracle's support site and found a few docs that mention this error but none were in relation to the Chrome browser.

I did a quick Google search and found an app on the Chrome Web Store called 'Oracle E-Business Suite R12&11i Form Startup' that supposedly addresses this issue but there is no mention of what it is doing to get around the error. Interestingly enough, the Chrome Web Store says that the app is from 'OracleERP'. I assume it is not an official Oracle approved app?

You mentioned in this post that a lot of your ATG staff use Chrome and I was curious if any of them have encountered this issue and if so, how they've worked around it.

You're right: we haven't posted any apps on the Chrome Web Store for the E-Business Suite. It sounds like it is an unauthorized third-party app, and Oracle doesn't make any claims of support for that app.

You probably won't be surprised to hear that the workaround is to use either Firefox or IE on Windows desktops.

I'm glad that you've found a solution that works for you. Unfortunately, this may not be good advice for all users.

Our official guidance for Firefox users is to use the latest ESR release. This is currently Firefox ESR 17.

As for Java: our official guidance for all EBS users is to stay current with the latest JRE release at all times. This guidance applies regardless of whether you're using Firefox or IE. All JRE 1.6 and 1.7 releases are now certified and compatible with EBS on the same day that they're released.

If you encounter compatibility issues with EBS and a specific JRE release, it's probably setup-related. You should log an SR to get help with that.

I appreciate your advocacy. As noted in the comments above, we're looking at certifying Chrome for future releases.

Oracle's Revenue Recognition rules prohibit us from discussing certification and release dates, but you're welcome to monitor or subscribe to this blog. I'll post updates here as soon as soon as they're available.

Why don't Oracle write a browser specific for Oracle Applications.
With centralized settings so that the general user has at least one way to access the application regardless of versions and settings.

I have been using Chrome on E-Bus for some time now. It worked perfectly up until a week ago.

What happened to it? What changed that it doesn't work anymore? I thought the guy that created the plugin was a genius for enabling forms to work on Chrome. I do not like IE, or FireFox but now I'm forced to use IE and make it my default no less. I don't have firefox installed, I like it even less than IE.
I work for a hosting company so I have to constantly open different version of forms. They all worked with Chrome, there were always issues with the other browsers.

By default, Chrome updates itself. Our experience is that some versions of Chrome are less-compatible than others. It's possible that one of your Chrome installs that worked was automatically upgraded to one that didn't work. We are struggling with getting Forms to launch with Chrome ourselves, and we're working directly with Forms Development, so I am not surprised that you're having issues with it.

I can't comment on the third-party plug-in for EBS compatibility. I would strongly recommend against using that for production EBS users.

I'm glad that Chrome is working for you. As you can see in my comment above to "Guest" today, we've had some challenges in making Chrome work consistently across different releases. Even worse, we are struggling to launch Forms in Chrome.

We're working on our IE 11 certification right now, in parallel with our Chrome certification. Both are turning out to be more-complicated than we expected. I'm sorry for the delay. We'll get these out as soon as we can make them work reliably for all users on all EBS releases.

After more than 3 years of waiting we can conclude Oracle is not going to support Google. Chrome browser is a good example of this. Android RunTime vs java runtime are the key reasons for the conflict.